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Late last year, I visited the Bacon exhibition at Tate Britain. I had previously seen isolated examples of his work in London and New York; I felt very privileged to be in those rooms but the overwhelming emotion was one of pure, unadulterated shock. My senses were being ravished. I felt I was reeling from room to room, I had never experienced anything quite like this before. I fled, breathless, into the winter’s day, trying to comprehend what I had just seen.
My Baconisation started in 1995 when I read Dan Farson’s wonderful The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon — I became instantly fascinated and captivated by both his work and his lifestyle. Here is a man who years earlier had assaulted the sensibilities of the London art-viewing public by exhibiting Three Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. It was a horrifying introduction to a body of work that was to evolve into surely one of the most important ever created. Here is a man, self-taught, almost entirely self-educated, painting the pleasure and the pain of his own existence. Such integrity produces great art — for great is from the heart.